Ethics and Negotiation: 5 Principles of Negotiation to Boost Your Bargaining Skills in Business Situations

How to use the principles behind negotiation ethics to create win-win agreements for you and your bargaining counterpart

Knowing the norms of ethics and negotiation can be useful whether you’re negotiating for yourself or on behalf of someone else. Each ethical case you come up against will have its own twists and nuances, but there a few principles that negotiators should keep in mind while at the bargaining table.

By asking yourself the following questions, you can illuminate the boundaries between right and wrong at the negotiation table and in the process discover your own ethical standards:

See Also:Trust in Negotiations – Trust takes time to develop but negotiators rarely have time to build strong relationships with their counterparts so instead a cautious approach is undertaken in order to protect yourself from a bad deal. In this article, the argument for taking risks during a negotiation with a counterpart that you do not know is explored and the benefits and pitfalls of this risk-taking approach are delineated.

See Also:Beware Your Counterpart’s Biases – After a failed negotiation, it’s tempting to construct a story about how the other side’s irrationality led to impasse. Unfortunately, such stories will not resurrect the deal. In the past we have encouraged you to ‘debias’ your own behavior by identifying the assumptions that may be clouding your judgment. We have introduced you to a number of judgment biases – common, systematic errors in thinking that are likely to affect your decisions and harm your outcomes in negotiation.

See Also:Strategies for Negotiating More Rationally – In past articles, we have highlighted a variety of psychological biases that affect negotiators, many of which spring from a reliance on intuition. Of course, negotiators are not always affected by bias; we often think systematically and clearly at the bargaining table. Most negotiators believe they are capable of distinguishing between situations in which they can safely rely on intuition from those that require more careful thought – but often they are wrong. In fact, most of us trust our intuition more than evidence suggests that we should

Which negotiation principle is most important to you? Let us know in the comments..